Friends Association for Higher Education

A BIRTHDAY HOMAGE TO PAUL ROBESON!

Paul Robeson as Othello by Carl Van Vechten

Dear F/friends, In recognition of Quaker-descendent Paul Robeson’s 128th birthday, the BlackQuakerProject offers a personal statement from Friend Harold D. Weaver Jr., reflecting on the extraordinary achievements, humanism, and self-sacrifice that defined Robeson’s life as well as the razing of his career during the cultural stranglehold of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. We further wish to share an accounting of Professor Weaver’s decades-long efforts to restore Robeson to his rightful place in world history and a directory you can use to explore the many fruits of this advocacy.

A personal statement from Dr. Harold D. Weaver Jr.

Dr. Weaver Lectures on Robeson at the Nordic Arts School, Kokkola, Finland, 2008.

Paul Robeson lived during the same period—1898-1976—as did my father, college professor Dr. Harold D. Weaver Sr. This was a time in USA history when African-descendant folks suffered as we imagine hell to be. Besides my family, I have no greater respect for any American who ever lived than this renaissance man, who never bowed to injustice even “one-thousandth part of an inch.” 

Robeson was directly descended from over 250 years of Quakers in England and the British colony in North America. This included the first mayor of Philadelphia, European-American Humphrey Moray, during the rule of William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania (1681 charter from England’s King Charles II). This also included prominent ancestors of African descent: celebrated educators Grace Bustill Douglass (c. 1782-1842) and her daughter, Sarah Mapps Douglass (1806-1882), who were both relegated to the back bench of their Arch Street Friends meetinghouse in Philadelphia despite their commitment and contributions to Quakerism and to the improvement of health and women’s rights. 

Growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, Robeson was the son of previously enslaved Rev. William Drew Robeson, the minister of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton. The crucial advice of his father—(1) to attain the highest possible, (2) to pursue only worthwhile goals, and (3) to remain loyal to his convictions—would influence Robeson to achieve near perfection in almost everything he set out to do, as well as the moral commitment to follow his beliefs without compromise. Unfortunately, his Quaker mother, Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, a school teacher, died in a house fire before young Paul entered primary school. Sadly, he had no memory of her. We can only imagine the impact of her genes and 250 years of direct Quaker ancestry on this incredible overachiever in so many areas of life.

At Rutgers University, Robeson had a legendary academic and non-academic career, graduating in 1919 as a 2-year Phi Beta Kappa member, class valedictorian, four-letter athlete, 2-year All-American football star, and winner of every university oratorical contest for which he was eligible. Though he was a member of the Rutgers Glee Club, his African heritage prevented his participation in off-campus concerts. His collegiate achievements served as a preamble to the future world-renowned artist of screen, stage, music, and recordings. He starred in twelve films, performed in concert halls across the globe, and touched the hearts of people around the world with his recordings. Especially notable were his pioneering stage performance of Othello and his recordings singing “Ol’ Man River,” the lyrics of which he changed significantly as his politics—and the world’s politics—changed. 

A revolutionary humanist and influential Pan-Africanist, Robeson was committed to Black liberation and dignity worldwide. At great personal cost, he connected the liberation struggle of Africans, African Americans, and the people of the Caribbean in condemning Western imperialism. Trinidadian scholar-activist-playwright C.L.R. James, Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neruda, and anti-colonial Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere were among those respected international figures who called him a friend and praised his artistic commitment to justice and freedom around the world. He was also a confidant of USSR political leader Nikita Khrushchev. The USA government, economic institutions, cultural czars, and media united to take away his livelihood, to seize his passport for eight years (1950-1958), to institute an industry boycott of his records, and to bar him from concert halls. Is that not totalitarianism, exemplifying the unity and collaboration of the political, economic, and cultural? Robeson was never even allowed to appear on television—a total “white-out.”

Pioneering Advocacy Activities of Prof. Weaver on Behalf of Paul Robeson, Rutgers University, 1970-74: Honorary Doctorate, Course, Film Festival-Symposium, Film, and Publications. 

Professor Weaver Presenting His Paul Robeson Film at Rutgers University, 1972

When Weaver arrived at Rutgers from the Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes/St. Denis in September 1970 to head and create a new program in Afro-American and African Studies, he found that not a single student in the first class of the introductory course had ever heard of Paul Robeson even though most were African Americans from New Jersey. He felt a mission to correct that. Over the next three and a half years, he worked to return Robeson to his rightful place in Rutgers, USA, and world history. In May 1971, Pete Seeger, Ossie Davis, Paul Robeson Jr., and Weaver broke the nationwide TV silence on Robeson, appearing as panelists in the Emmy-award-winning, 3-part PBS (then National Education Television) series, New Jersey Speaks: A Tribute to Paul Robeson. The following year, he taught the first course in the world on Robeson, Black Biography and the Times: Paul Robeson, for which he produced and narrated the educational short film, “Paul Robeson: Identity, Political Economy, and Communications,” which also became the synthesizing, closing theme of the new introductory course, assuring that all students studying Africana Studies at Rutgers College were exposed to Mr. Robeson. In April 1973, to celebrate Robeson’s 75th birthday, Weaver organized the first USA Paul Robeson Symposium and Film Festival, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Johnson and Johnson International, and the university. This week-long celebration began with a keynote address from the great Trinidadian scholar, playwright, and political activist, C.L.R. James, and presentations by other major Robeson scholars and activists. This advocacy culminated in Weaver’s initiation of the action that led to the university’s awarding Robeson an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in April 1973. Later that fall, he organized a panel on Robeson for the annual conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in New York, during which he also screened two films in a Robeson mini-film festival. In December 1973/January 1974, Weaver published two articles on his role model–”Paul Robeson and Film: Racism and Anti-Racism in Communications” in The Negro History Bulletin and “Paul Robeson: Beleaguered Leader” in The Black Scholar (reprinted with some changes in Jacobin magazine in June 2021).

Conclusion

In the decades since his resignation from Rutgers in February 1974, Dr. Weaver has continued to organize film festivals and symposia screening Robeson’s work and to  lecture on Robeson at universities and other non-formal educational institutions in China, Mexico, Finland, Taiwan, Canada, and the USA, including Beijing University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Universite’ Laval, University of Toronto, Harvard University, Virginia Union University, Princeton University, Talladega College, Yale University,  Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) (Cuernavaca, Mexico), and the Nordic Arts Institute (Kokkola, Finland).

A Partial List of Resources by and from Harold D. Weaver Jr.

• “Paul Robeson: Beleaguered Leader,” The Black Scholar (1973).

• “Paul Robeson and The Pan-African World,” Présence Africaine (1978)

• Paul Robeson: Identity, Political Economy, and Communications, Rutgers University, (1972). 

• The 2022 and 2023 Black Quaker Lives Matter Film Festival & Forum:

• “Paul Robeson & His 200 Years of USA Quaker Ancestors” featuring Joyce Mosley, Mark Solomon, and Harold D. Weaver Jr. (hosted over Zoom and in-person at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts). 

• “Paul Robeson 125th Birthday Celebration” featuring Dr. Gerald Horne, Dr. Charles Musser, and Dr. Harold D. Weaver.

• 50 Years of Advocacy for and Research on Paul Robeson” (an educational video Produced by the BlackQuaker Project). 

What are your feelings and thoughts about Paul Robeson? We invite you to write to us with your responses at theblackquakerproject@gmail.com.

Peace and Blessings,

The BlackQuaker Project

Quakers, Slavery, and the Slave Trade

On 25 March 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in the wake of growing uprisings by enslaved Africans throughout the “New World,” most notably the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly acknowledged that “the slave trade and slavery are among the worst violations of human rights in the history of humanity” and selected 25 March as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This UN-designated day of memorialization honors over 15 million victims of Western Europe’s centuries-long enslavement and trafficking of Africans throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. The BlackQuaker Project wishes to impress upon readers the breadth, duration, and depth of cruelty characterizing both the slave trade and legal chattel slavery, focusing especially on the USA. We also wish to discuss how Quakers, who actively participated in these crimes against humanity, can atone for their historical culpability.

Chattel Slavery in the USA (1619-1865)

From the time an English pirate ship landed in Hampton, Virginia, in 1619 with captive Africans below deck to the final surrender of Confederate holdouts in Galveston, Texas, on 19 June 1865 (Juneteenth), European settlers bought and sold Black men, women, and children as livestock, forcing generations into a life of hard manual labor, often at the barrel of a gun. For over 200 years, Africans were stripped of their religion, culture, and language; forced into brutal forms of labor; and lived under the threat of torture, mutilation, sexual assault, and family separation. Whether as house servants, field hands, factory workers, seamstresses, masons, carpenters, shoemakers, spinners, or millers, Black labor was the economic bedrock of the USA. Enslaved Africans worked in iron furnaces in Maryland; laid the tracks for railroads throughout Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and much of the South; mined and cut the stone lining the walls of the White House; and constructed various other key pieces of American infrastructure, such as the Patowmack Canal in Washington, D.C., through brutal, physical labor. Furthermore it was the grueling work of African field hands–who grew cotton, tobacco, and sugar under the exploitative Southern planter class–that truly fueled the country’s 19th-century transformation into an agricultural superpower. 

You may be familiar with the plantation regimes of the antebellum South, but perhaps are unaware of the North’s extensive participation in chattel slavery. Kidnapped Africans were auctioned on Wall Street, worked the docks of New York City, tilled soil on farms throughout New England, and acted as house servants to the president and professors of Harvard University. Additionally, cotton grown in the South was processed in textile mills throughout the North; major investment banks, such as Brown Brothers Harriman, financed the cotton industry by lending millions to Southern plantation owners, slave traders, and cotton brokers; and New England’s prestigious universities accepted endowments from plantation owners in the South and Barbados.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (1450s-1860s)

“The European slave trade was a direct block in removing millions of youth and young adults, the human agents from whom inventive­ness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production.”

Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

For over 300 years, the empires of Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden forcibly relocated more than 15 million people from western and central Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. European merchants destabilized the continent’s civilizations by selling spears, knives, and even gunpowder to African conquerors in war, who kidnapped men, women, and children from rival communities and marched them hundreds of miles in chains to ports on the Gold Coast and elsewhere. Those who survived the journey were penned into holding cells by the hundreds before being forced onto ships bound for the infamous Middle Passage.

During the 6-7 week transatlantic journey, European slavers shackled kidnapped Africans together, hand-to-leg, in spaces 4-5 feet wide and 2-3 feet tall. Captives endured physical, sexual, and psychological abuse from their captors and were beset by disease, dehydration, sea sickness, and malnutrition. A 1990 study by Patrick Manning estimated that, of the 12 million Africans captured and sold into slavery between the 16th and 19th centuries, roughly 4 million died before even leaving the continent and another 1.5 million perished while crossing the Middle Passage. (Manning, p. 261) Legal trafficking of Africans to the USA ended in 1807, a year before Britain’s abolishment of the trade. However, the trans-Atlantic trade continued legally in Spain until 1817 and illegally throughout the world until the 1860s.

Quaker Complicity & Profiting in Slavery & the Slave Trade

“The self-righteous narrative of Quaker superiority to other Christian faiths by virtue of our involvement in the Underground Railroad and other abolitionist efforts situates us as enlightened folks who have steadily been on the right side of history. This false narrative of exceptionalism does not help us dissolve ongoing hypocrisy by confronting historical and ongoing racism.”

Mary Watkins, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #489 (October 2024)

How did Quakers historically participate in and benefit from the economic juggernaut of  chattel slavery in the Americas? Drawing on the groundbreaking 2024 Pendle Hill pamphlet, Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest on the Path to Reparations: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657–1776) and White Supremacy, by Mary Watkins, we learn that many Friends directly participated in and benefitted financially from slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, thousands of Friends enslaved and sold Africans. By 1700, for example, all but four of the Quaker families living among the roughly 1,200 Friends settled in Barbados, owned slaves.  In her 2019 Friends Journal article, “Slavery in the Quaker World,” historian Katherine Gerber notes that “trade with Barbados was a source of pride and a symbol of prosperity for many English Quakers who considered slavery to be necessary for economic development.” The majority of Quaker leadership in Pennsylvania, including William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, owned enslaved people until slavery was made a disownable offense by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1758. Even Friends who did not own enslaved people directly profited from the labor of enslaved Africans by exchanging their timber and food for cash and slave-produced sugar. Importantly, Quaker founding father George Fox did not oppose slavery. In fact, he argued that slave owners should share the Gospel with their captives so that the enslaved could achieve spiritual–but not physical–freedom.

Retrospective Justice:
A Quaker Model of Atonement for Addressing Past Injustice

“We grieve with God for the exponential impact of historical and ongoing injustice. This includes the impact of colonization, forced displacement, slavery, economic exploitation and racism. We are called to disrupt patterns of oppression and division, to acknowledge offenses, to challenge false notions of white supremacy, to repudiate doctrines of discovery, to make amends and to work for reparative and retrospective justice.”

Tapestry Document, Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), 2024 World Plenary Meeting, Johannesburg, South Africa

In August 2024, BQP director Friend Harold D. Weaver Jr., and Friend Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge urged Quakers participating in the FWCC World Plenary in Johannesburg, South Africa, to adopt a model of Retrospective Justice as the Quaker approach to dealing with reparations on the global stage. Click here to watch Friend Weaver’s oral presentation. To implement this model, the BQP advises Friends to take the following chronological steps: (1) acknowledge an offense but do not apologize; (2) commit to truth-telling through exhaustive research; and (3) make amends in the present via programs of political, economic, psychological, cultural, and spiritual rehabilitation and healing. 

The concrete advocacy of Friends Nozizwe and Hal culminated in the FWCC’s release of a landmark post-plenary tapestry document, excerpted above, that called on Quakers worldwide “to work for reparative and retrospective justice.” It also led to the formation of the PARR (Participation, Action, Reflection and Research) Working Group on Reparatory/Retrospective Justice which, under Nozizwe’s leadership, aims to assist Quaker meetings and organizations in their efforts to address the “exponential impact of historical and ongoing injustice.” We implore Friends to seize the momentum generated by the 2024 World Plenary and take real action in advance of the forthcoming FWCC Global Online Conference, 27 September to 3 October 2027.

Questions for Friends

• How do you personally feel about the complicity of Quakers, including weighty Friends, in the slave trade and slavery? What do you feel that we should be doing now in response to their involvement in this historical injustice?
• What is your response to the 2024 World Plenary Tapestry Document excerpted above? How do you feel the Society of Friends should respond? 
• Was there information revealed today that was new or shocking?

Works Cited

• Gerbner, Katharine. “Slavery in the Quaker World: Christian Slavery and White Supremacy.” Friends Journal, 1 Sept. 2019, www.friendsjournal.org/slavery-in-the-quaker-world/. 
• Manning, Patrick. “The Slave Trade: The Formal Demography of a Global System.” Social Science History, vol. 14, no. 2, 1990, pp. 255–279, https://doi.org/10.2307/1171441.
• Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. 
• Watkins, Mary. Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest on the Path to Reparations: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657–1776) and White Supremacy, Pendle Hill, Wallingford, PA, 2024.
• Weaver, Harold  D., Jr. Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill. 2020 pamphlet/2026 audiobook. 
• Weaver, Harold D., Jr. “A Proposed Plan for Retrospective Justice.” Friends Journal, 3 Jan. 2021. 

We encourage you to write to us at theblackquakerproject@gmail.com with your thoughts, questions, and feedback. 

Peace and Blessings,

The BlackQuaker Project

Voices from the Quakers of Color International Archive (QCIA)

A belated Happy International Women’s Day from the BlackQuaker Project (BQP)! In celebration of this global holiday, which has now evolved into Women’s History Month, the BQP honors 5 pioneering women featured in our Quakers of Color International Archive (QCIA). From the USA and Bolivia to South Africa and Palestine, these seeker-activists have emerged as influential figures in Quakerism across education, governance, diplomacy and international relations, and human rights. Their ongoing leadership in the face of widespread institutional failure can serve as an example to Friends pursuing Truth and Justice within our divided societies. Interviews with the following 5 Quaker women leaders of color are among the testimonies you can find online in our QCIA installations at the Haverford College Library and at the UMass Amherst Library.

Joyce Ajlouny 
General Secretary, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). 
Palestinian American. Bethesda Friends Meeting. Interviewed by Cooper Vaughn.

Born in Ramallah, Palestine, Friend Joyce leads the AFSC in its efforts to bring peace and justice within our domestic and international communities. Under her leadership, the  AFSC has established the “Reparative Justice & Healing Fund“ to support Black and Indigenous-led social justice initiatives across the USA; founded the Salama Hub, a research and advocacy center for peace that coordinates with civil society organizations in East Africa; and recently developed the “Love As Action” initiative, calling on Friends’ meetings to hold silent vigils protesting USA militarism and imperialism while providing guidance for Friends seeking to mobilize their communities in non-violent protest. For the past three years, she has worked tirelessly to lead the AFSC in responding to the genocide in occupied Palestine: by the spring of 2024, the AFSC had provided humanitarian aid, including food and clean drinking water, to over 400,000 people in the Gaza Strip. She has also pushed for educational institutions to divest from Israel, whose genocide would not be possible without the support of the USA government, military-industrial complex, and the administrations of many of our elite colleges and universities. The BQP remains grateful for the AFSC’s and Joyce’s sponsorship of our BlackQuaker Lives Matter Film Festival and Forum. 

In this one case, please contact hc-special@haverford.edu to request access to Friend Joyce’s videotaped and transcribed QCIA interview.

Lauren Brownlee 
Deputy General Secretary, Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). 
African American. Bethesda Friends Meeting. Interviewed by Cooper Vaughn.

A longtime educator turned policy advocate, Friend Lauren helps lead FCNL during a time when voices speaking truth to power have largely been silenced within the USA capitol. Among her activities are helping to oversee FCNL’s campaign for an end to the genocide in Gaza, which has seen the lobby take 500 visits to capitol hill and coordinate with Quakers around the world to send over 730,000 letters to congress calling for a ceasefire and humantirian aid. Lauren also leads FCNL’s Governance, Community, and Culture team, who are responsible for guiding the lobby’s commitments to Anti-racism, Anti-bias, Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (AJEDI). She recently helped coordinate the lobby’s efforts to mitigate the harms of “The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” collaborating with various faith communities to delay and reduce the catastrophic effects of the bill however possible. Lauren serves on the AFSC corporation and board, as well as the steering committees of Quaker Call to Action and Quakers for Peace in Palestine and Israel. She is co-clerk of the Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racism steering committee, which trains and sponsors cadres of emerging justice practitioners on a yearly basis. She is also the co-clerk of AFSC’s Community, Equity, and Justice Board Committee. 

To view Friend Lauren’s videotaped and transcribed QCIA interview, please click here.

Ayesha Imani 
CEO of Sankofa Freedom Academy. Co-founder of Ujima Friends Meeting and Peace Center African American. Ujima Friends Meeting and Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting. Interviewed by Emma Lapsansky-Werner.

A pioneering voice for African American Quakers within the Religious Society of Friends, Friend Ayesha was a founding member of the Fellowship of Friends of African Descent in 1990 and in 2016 co-founded Ujima Friends Meeting, an Afro-centric monthly meeting that worships in North Philadelphia. A lifelong educator, Ayesha taught in Philadelphia public schools for over three decades. She co-created, with Friend Phil Lord, the Ujima Friends Peace Center as an outreach ministry which offers spiritually nourishing educational programs to local youth with a focus on literacy, conflict resolution, and environmental stewardship. Inspired by her son’s desire to share the values and methods of Quaker education with the wider Philadelphia community, Ayesha founded the Sankofa Freedom Academy Charter School, which draws on the methodologies of private Friends schools and the grassroots educational programs of the Civil Rights Movement to provide a K-12 college preparatory program for predominantly Black and Brown youth.

To view Friend Ayesha’s videotaped and transcribed QCIA interview, please click here.

Emma Condori Mamani
Director, Friends International Bilingual Center, La Paz, Bolivia. Author, Educator, and Scholar. Indigenous Bolivian (Aymaran). Bella Vista Friends Church. Interviewed by Harold D. Weaver Jr.

Born into an Aymara family in the highlands of Bolivia, Friend Emma advocates for the needs of indigenous Bolivian Friends whose rural communities currently endure the increasingly catastrophic effects of climate change. In 2017 she authored the book, Quakers in Bolivia: The Early History of Bolivian Friends, which charts the history and growth of the Indigenous Aymara Quaker community in Bolivia. As director of the Friends International Bilingual Center she oversees language classes in English, Spanish, and Aymaran; offers educational programs to children and adults; and provides food to families living in the Bolivian highlands facing droughts. 

To view Friend Emma’s videotaped and transcribed QCIA interview, please click here.

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge
South African Anti-Apartheid Activist; Former Deputy Minister of Health and Former Deputy Minister of Defense, Government of South Africa. Former Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly. Director, Embrace Dignity. South African. Cape Western Monthly Meeting. Interviewed by Harold D. Weaver Jr. 

A key anti-apartheid figure, Friend Nozizwe was one of the few women involved in negotiating South Africa’s transition from white-minority rule to democratic governance by a de-segregated parliament. In 1999 she was appointed Deputy Minister of Defence and worked, in consultation with local Quakers, to steer South Africa’s National Defense Force towards development and peacekeeping, rather than militarism. In 2004 she became Deputy Minister of Health and challenged her President’s denial of the HIV-AIDS pandemic and refusal to distribute life-saving, anti-retroviral drugs. Now, with her non-profit, Embrace Dignity, she continues the fight for women’s total emancipation by helping to end commercial sexual exploitation through law, including their recent push for South Africa’s parliament to adopt the Sankara Equality Model Law, which criminalizes sex buyers and exploiters but not those who are sold. Since 2020 Friend Nozizwe has collaborated closely with the BQP, advocating with Harold D. Weaver Jr. for Retrospective Justice as the Quaker model for healing historical and recent injustice. Their work has taken them around the world, including to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (London) and the Quaker United Nations Office (Geneva), and, via Zoom, to Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre (UK), Pendle Hill (USA), and the Friends World Committee for Consultation’s 2024 World Plenary Meeting (Johannesburg, South Africa). 

To view Friend Nozizwe’s 2-part videotaped and transcribed QCIA interview, please click here (part 1) and here (part 2). 

Our QCIA interviews with these 5 Friends and 25 other remarkable Quaker women and men of color are available online at the Haverford College Library’s Quaker & Special Collections and The Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the UMass Amherst W.E.B Du Bois Library. 

As always, we encourage you to write to us at theblackquakerproject@gmail.com with your questions, insights, and feedback.

Peace and Blessings,

The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting, 
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
www.theblackquakerproject.org
11 March 2026

New Book and Audiobooks from the BlackQuaker Project, 2025-2026:
Innovative Learning Resources Challenging Conventional Narratives

Dear F/friends,

We wind down our celebration of the 2026 Black History Month by spotlighting a milestone: a trio of unique books that the BlackQuaker Project (BQP) has released over the past 8 months. Two major Quaker organizations, Friends General Conference (FGC) and Pendle Hill, have respectively adapted two of our ministry’s print publications to audiobooks. Africa World Press has also published a new book, five decades in the making, on the personal experiences of Harold D. Weaver, Jr., with African students in Moscow during the height of the Cold War. Together, this intimate historical study and these lively audiobooks offer new knowledge to educators, students, scholars, and activists while challenging conventional wisdom and norms.

1. New Book: Race, Decolonization, and the Cold War: African Student Elites in Moscow, 1955-1964 (2025). By Harold D. Weaver, Jr. 

Friend Weaver offers a new interpretation of an important Cold-War phenomenon: post-colonial African students in the USSR and other Socialist countries. The African American Quaker scholar-activist reveals accurate information–based on participant observation and interviews–on the actual experiences of African students in Moscow during the crucial decolonization period of the 1960s, dispelling misinformation and disinformation of earlier Western narratives in media and scholarship. Available at Africa World Press. 

2. New Audiobook: Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives (2026). Written and narrated by Harold D. Weaver, Jr.In this manifesto for 21st century Quakerism, the author urges listeners to adopt a model of Retrospective Justice to heal past and recent injustices, identifies various forms of structural violence that we must confront with anti-violence, argues that justice must be front-and-center in the testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends, and suggests replacing SPICES as an acronym for Quakerism with “JaM with SPICES:” Justice and Mercy with Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship, as the first step towards moving beyond our reliance on any acronym to sum up the complexities of modern Quakerism. Now available at Audible and in his seminal 2020 Pendle Hill pamphlet.

3. New Audiobook: Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality & Human Rights (2025). Edited by Harold D. Weaver Jr., Paul Kriese, and Stephen W. Angell. Narrated by actors JeNie Fleming and Lance Danton

Our trailblazing 2011 anthology pulled together the collected works of 18 African American Quakers across 200 years of USA history, from early 19th century visionaries like Sojourner Truth and Sarah Mapps Douglass to mid-20th century trailblazers such as Howard Thurman, Ira de Augstine Reid, and Bayard Rustin. In August 2025, FGC gave this book a second act–with talented actors bringing to life–in such a way that the printed page cannot–the speeches, poems, songs, studies, and essays of our collection. This captivating audiobook is available at Audible, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.

For Further Resources: Quakers of Color International Archive (QCIA):
We also encourage you to explore the Quakers of Color International Archive (QCIA), which has recently released 17 new interviews available online at Haverford College Library’s Quaker & Special Collections. They join our pilot program of 12 testimonies which you can also find online at the UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library. Across both libraries you will find a collection of videotaped and transcribed interviews with Friends of Color from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, Asian America, the Caribbean, and African America. 

We hope these innovative resources will aid those seeking truth and justice, and encourage you to write to us at theblackquakerproject@gmail.com with any reflections, insights, or questions you may have.

Peace and Blessings,

The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting, 
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
www.theblackquakerproject.org
27 February 2026

Dear F/friends,

Our celebration of Black History Month continues. Recently our ministry announced an exciting, new chapter for the Quakers of Color International Archive (QCIA) at Haverford College. This development would not have been possible without our pilot program of testimonies from 12 weighty Friends of Color, which remain available at the UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library’s Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center.

Conducted between 2019 and 2021 by active Quaker scholars and archivists: Max Carter (MCa), Robert S. Cox (RSC), Mary Crauderueff (MCr), Emma Lapsansky-Werner (ELW), and Harold D. Weaver Jr. (HDW), these rich testimonies are a tremendous learning and teaching resource for educators, students, scholars, and the public.

We invite you to experience interviews with Quakers from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asian America, and African America:

1. Joan Countryman, pioneering school administrator; former Head, Lincoln School; co-founder, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership School for Girls in South Africa; first African American graduate of Germantown Friends School. African American. Germantown Friends Meeting. Interviewer: ELW. 
2. Maurice Gray Eldridge, pioneering college and arts administrator; former Vice President, College and Community Relations, Swarthmore College; co-founder and former  president, the Chester Charter School for the Arts. African American. Swarthmore Friends Meeting. Interviewer: ELW. 
3. Carolyne Lamar Jordan, academic administrator and consultant; former Dean of Academic Affairs, Cape Cod Community College; former Board member, AFSC. West Falmouth Friends Meeting. Interviewer: HDW.
4. Lawrence M. Jordan, physicist; active leadership with the Quaker Institute of the Future; former Clerk, Memphis Friends Meeting and West Falmouth Friends Meeting. African American. West Falmouth Friends Meeting. Interviewer: HDW.
5. Emma Lapsansky-Werner, historian, biographer,  and author of several important texts; Emerita Professor of History and Emerita Curator, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College. African American. Lansdowne Friends Meeting. Interviewer: MCr. 
6. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, Founder and Director, Embrace Dignity; South African Anti-Apartheid Movement Leader; Former Deputy Minister of Health and Former Deputy Minister of Defense, Government of South Africa. South African. Cape Western Monthly Meeting. Interviewer: HDW. (Interview in two parts). 
7. Emma Condori Mamani, Director, Friends International Bilingual Center in Bolivia. Author, Educator, and Scholar. Indigenous Bolivian (Aymaran). Bella Vista Friends Church. Interviewer: HDW. 
8. Kenneth A. Oye, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, MIT; former Director of the Program on Emerging Technologies, MIT; Board, AFSC and Quaker United Nations Office. Japanese American. Wellesley Friends Meeting. Interviewer: HDW. 
9. Dancan Sabwa, Minister; Former Presiding Clerk of Quaker Youth, Kenya Chapter; Assistant Treasurer of Quaker Men International; Co-founder of the Kitale Youth Project Fund. Kenyan. East Africa Yearly Meeting–North. Interviewer: HDW. 
10. James Varner, NAACP leader; Former President and CEO, Maine Human Rights Coalition. African American. Orono Monthly Meeting. Interviewer: HDW. 
11. Harold D. Weaver Jr., Founder, BlackQuaker Project & Quakers of Color International Archive. Pioneer in Black-Quaker Studies & Africana Studies. Advocate for Paul Robeson and Bayard Rustin. Founding Chair, Africana Studies Dept., Rutgers. Author/editor, books & audiobooks: new narratives on violence, Black Quakers, the Cold War. Interviewer: RSC 
12. Jean Mikhail Zaru, Human Rights Movement Leader; Author, Occupied with Nonviolence: A Palestinian Woman Speaks (2008), a necessary reading on systemic violence; Founder, The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Palestinian. Ramallah Friends Meeting. Interviewer: MCa.

The BQP hopes you will find these testimonies at UMass Amherst illuminating and nourishing. We also encourage you to visit the QCIA’s new installation at Haverford College, home to both recent and forthcoming videotaped interviews and transcripts. Together, the testimonies across these two libraries offer us not only a portrait of Quaker life around the world, but new narratives and new models for 21st century Quakerism. 

As always, we strongly encourage your feedback and insight: theblackquakerproject@gmail.com. 

Peace and Blessings,

The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting, 
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
www.theblackquakerproject.org
23 February 2026

The Quakers of Color International Archive:
Meet Our New Interviewees & Host/Exhibitor
For Educators, Students, Scholars, and the General Public

This Black History Month, the BlackQuaker Project is blessed to announce that our Quakers of Color International Archive (QCIA) has a new home at the Haverford College Library’s Quaker and Special Collections, which has released 17 new interviews from distinguished Friends of Color around the world. These videotaped interviews and transcriptions are now available to educators, students, scholars, and the general public online at TriCollege Libraries Digital Collections: Quakers of Color International Archives Oral Histories. Our initial wave of 13 interviews remain available online through the UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library’s Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center.

Conceived by Harold D. Weaver Jr. as a multi-media study-and-research collection by and about Quakers of Color worldwide, the QCIA launched in spring 2019 with a pilot program of in-person interviews championed and overseen by Friend Robert F. Cox, the late director of Special Collections and University Archives at UMass Amherst. Videotaped and transcribed Interviews with the following Friends of Middle Eastern, African, African American, and Caribbean descent are now available at Haverford:

1. Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Palestinian American. Bethesda Friends Meeting.Write to hc-special@haverford.edu for access to her interview and transcript.
2. Lauren Brownlee, Deputy Secretary of Friends Council on National Legislation (FCNL). African American. Bethesda Friends Meeting.
3. Francisco Burgos, Executive Director, Pendle Hill. Dominican American. Harrisburg Friends Meeting.
4. Oskar Castro, Coordinator, Quaker Voluntary Service in Philadelphia. Puerto Rican. Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting.
5. Brian Corr, Deputy Monitor & Community Liaison, Louisville Community Commitment Consent Decree; Member of the Board of Directors, AFSC; Former Executive Director, Police Review & Advisory Board, City of Cambridge. African American. Friends Meeting at Cambridge. 
6. Rashid Darden, Associate Secretary of Communications and Outreach, Friends General Conference (FGC). African American. Friends Meeting of Washington.
7. Debby Flack, Britain Yearly Meeting Reparations Committee; Volunteer Witness, Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine. Caribbean British. Godalming Quaker Meeting, UK.
8. Keith Harvey, Former AFSC Northeast Regional Director. African American. New England Yearly Meeting of Friends. 
9. Ayesha Imani, CEO of Sankofa Freedom Academy.  African American. Ujima Friends Meeting and Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting.
10. Phliip Lord, Former Presiding Clerk, AFSC; Executive Director of the Tenant Union Representative Network (TURN). African American. Ujima Friends Meeting and Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting.
11. Samuel Chi-Yuen Lowe, Chaplain at the Boston Medical Center; former AFSC Board and Third-World Coalition member. Chinese American. Framingham Friends Meeting.
12. Hezron Masitsa, Justice & Peace Secretary, Friends World Committee for Consultation World Office. Kenyan. Nairobi Yearly Meeting. 
13. Clinton Pettus, Former Clerk of the Board, Pendle Hill; Former Associate General Secretary, AFSC. African American. Third Haven Friends Meeting.
14. Paula Rhodes, Attorney; Professor Emerita of Law, University of Denver; former Board Member, AFSC.  African American. Mountain View Friends Meeting.
15. Diane Rowley, Emerita Professor of the Practice of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; former Board Member, AFSC. African American. Atlanta Monthly Meeting.
16. Niyonu Spann, Organizational Developer, Founder of Beyond Diversity 101; former Executive Director of the Green Circle Program. African American. Chester Friends Meeting.
17. Dwight Wilson, Educator, Administrator, First African American General Secretary of FGC, Former Headmaster of the Detroit Friends School. African American. Ann Arbor Friends Meeting. 

We owe these exciting developments to the longtime support of our QCIA Advisory Committee: Mary Crauderueff, Curator of Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College; Curator Emerita Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner; and Jordan Landes, Curator of Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. We are also grateful for the dedicated work of senior team member Cooper Vaughn, responsible for scheduling, producing, and, since 2025, conducting all interviews; and the contributions of former team members Jasmine Reed, Laura Mercedes, and Katalina Kastrong, all alums of the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.

We share observations from two members of our QCIA Advisory Committee about the importance of this QCIA collection–now at Haverford–to Quakerism and to the accurate telling of world history: 

Mary Crauderueff
Curator of the Haverford College Library’s Quaker and Special Collections:

“This exceptional, growing collection of oral histories of Quakers of Color from around the world is important to Quaker history in general, and assuredly will be used by scholars, students, and Quakers around the world.”

Emma Lapsansky-Werner
Professor Emerita of History at Haverford College and Emerita Curator of the Haverford College Library’s Quaker and Special Collections:

“It is exciting to see Haverford College’s Quaker Collection providing a home to an archive of what “Quakerism” looks like as that small cell of 17th-century northern-European Friends has moved across the world–and across the centuries to embrace–and to be outnumbered by–adherents from  “the global south”-The interviews will form an invaluable trove of information for future scholars and religious “seekers”–to enrich understanding of religious inquiry and behaviors!”

We hope you will explore the archive and welcome any thoughts or questions you wish to share. In the future, we expect to  spotlight the remarkable lives of various interviewees from our Haverford and UMass Amherst installation of our QCIA collection. 

Are there specific Quakers of Color worldwide that you would like to see interviewed? Are there questions of interest which you would like to see us pose in the future? How do you find these interviews especially enlightening? Please write to us for any suggestions or questions at theblackquakerproject@gmail.com.

Peace and Blessings,

The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting, 
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
www.theblackquakerproject.org   
12 February 2026

The BlackQuaker Project is thrilled to announce the recent release of the new, timely Pendle Hill audiobook narrated and written by Harold D. Weaver, Jr.: Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives. You may order it on Audible.

Professor Weaver brings to life his seminal 2020 Pendle Hill pamphlet (now in its second edition after the initial printing of 2,000 copies) with the warmth, magnetism, and clarity of a public intellectual whose lectures for decades have enriched universities, film festivals and fora, and international conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In this new audiobook of his BQP manifesto for 21st century-Quakerism, Friend Weaver offers listeners concrete steps to meet the material and spiritual demands of these dire times. The following actions are among those recommended for Quakers and others seeking true peace, justice, and equity:

1. Contributing to the ongoing international debate on reparations by adopting a Quaker model of Retrospective Justice to address past and recent injustices, such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, chattel slavery in the Americas, settler colonialism and other forms of European oppression in Africa, and Jim Crow and follow-up repression of African Americans in the USA. Drawing from the groundbreaking 2006 Brown University report, Slavery and Justice, we define Retrospective Justice as “an attempt to administer justice years after the commission of a severe injustice or series of injustices against persons, communities, or racial and ethnic groups.” To achieve this objective of justice, we advise Friends to take the following chronological steps: (1) acknowledge an offense, but do not apologize; (2) commit to truth-telling through in-depth research to uncover the depths and range of the injustice committed; and (3) make amends in the present via programs of political, economic, psychological, cultural, and spiritual rehabilitation and healing, including various forms of material and non-material reparations.
2. Confronting Structural Violence with anti-violence. This particular type of violence is defined by British Friend Adam Curle as “the political and economic inequalities which are built into the social structure.” Palestinian Quaker scholar and leader Sister Jean Zaru expanded on Professor Curle’s definition of structural violence in her 2008 book, Occupied with Non-Violence: A Palestinian Woman Speaks, with five universal forms of structural violence, which we apply to the African American reality in the USA (with a specific example for each): (1) economic structural violence (poverty), (2) political structural violence (voter disenfranchisement, militarization of law enforcement ), (3) cultural structural violence (omission and distortion of African American history), (4) religious structural violence (islamophobia), and (5) environmental structural violence (lead poisoning in Flint, MI, and the “cancer corridor” from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, LA). Our BlackQuaker Project audiobook and pamphlet have expanded her list, with the addition of two new major categories: health structural violence (prescription overpricing) and educational structural violence (school-to-prison pipeline). Challenging these forms of systemic violence will require a mobilization of local and national energy, organization, mutual aid, and massive funding. The overwhelming scope of this undertaking requires us to be radically anti-violent, not merely non-violent in challenging traditional direct violence.
   Note: In citing Palestinian Friend Zaru, we wish to remind readers of the current genocide against her people.
3. Placing Justice, too often neglected, front-and-center in our Quaker testimonies. We again cite Friend Adam Curle, founder of Peace Studies in the UK, who stated: “Justice has a twofold meaning: one spiritual–righteousness, the observance of the divine law; the other temporal– fairness, righteous dealing, integrity….[Our] vision of justice is the result of seeking to live in virtue of nonviolence, compassion, redemption, and love.” Can we have peace without justice? Can we have equality without justice? We think not.
4. Replacing SPICES as an acronym for Quakerism–initially created for non-Quakers–with “JaM with SPICES:” Justice and Mercy with Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. This is recommended only as an initial step towards moving beyond SPICES entirely as, in the long run, can any acronym convey the dynamic, complex, international phenomenon that Quakerism is today? Our ministry is doubtful. What do you think?

About the Author

Now in his 92nd year, Friend Hal Weaver was first exposed to Quakerism as a 16-year-old student at the Westtown School, followed by 4 years at Haverford College. Drafted into the US Army in 1957, Hal later made the difficult decision to become a conscientious objector when he was assigned to train others to kill. Weaver acknowledges the impact that Dr. King’s non-violent human-rights sturggle had on his decision. In recent decades, Friend Weaver has assumed governance roles in various Quaker organizations: the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker United Nations Office, Cambridge Friends School, Friends General Conference, and Haverford College, his alma mater. From this, he learned where Quakerism stood in the modern world and where it needed improvement, most acutely in the involvement of Quakers of Color.

Hal’s work continues through his BlackQuaker Project ministry, the fruits of which include the groundbreaking anthology, Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights (print 2011, audiobook 2025), edited with Paul Kriese and Stephen W. Angell, and his 2021 Friends Journal Article, “A Proposed Plan for Retrospective Justice (2021),” developed from his 2020 Pendle Hill pamphlet. In his latest written book, Race, Decolonization, and the Cold War: African Student Elites In Moscow, 1955-1964 (2025), Professor Weaver applies his unique perspective as a Quaker scholar-activist of African descent to his challenge of traditional Cold War stereotypes about African students in Moscow in the 1960’s, now available through Africa World Press. His 2026 Pendle Hill audiobook, Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives, is available to order here.

How do you feel about Retrospective Justice, structural violence and anti-violence, the importance of the Justice testimony, and the need to replace SPICES? We welcome your thoughts and feelings on these important BQP recommendations: theblackquakerproject@gmail.com .

Here is a link to a PDF of this newsletter:

Click to access its-out-new-audiobook-by-the-bqp.pdf

Peace and Blessings,
The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
4 February 2026